There's no comparison. GLM 4.7 is fine and reasonably competent at writing code, but K2.5 is right up there with something like Sonnet 4.5. it's the first time I can use an open-source model and not immediately tell the difference between it and top-end models from Anthropic and OpenAI.

It's waaay better than GLM 4.7 (which was the open model I was using earlier)! Kimi was able to quickly and smoothly finish some very complex tasks that GLM completely choked at.

The old Kimi K2 is better than GLM4.7

From what people say, it's better than GLM 4.7 (and I guess DeepSeek 3.2)

But it's also like... 10x the price per output token on any of the providers I've looked at.

I don't feel it's 10x the value. It's still much cheaper than paying by the token for Sonnet or Opus, but if you have a subscribed plan from the Big 3 (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google) it's much better value for $$.

Comes down to ethical or openness reasons to use it I guess.

Is the Lite plan enough for your projects?

You can run it on consumer grade hardware right now, but it will be rather slow. NVMe SSDs these days have a read speed of 7 GB/s (EDIT: or even faster than that! Thank you @hedgehog for the update), so it will give you one token roughly every three seconds while crunching through the 32 billion active parameters, which are natively quantized to 4 bit each. If you want to run it faster, you have to spend more money.

Some people in the localllama subreddit have built systems which run large models at more decent speeds: https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/

You can run it on a mac studio with 512gb ram, that's the easiest way. I run it at home on a multi rig GPU with partial offload to ram.

You need 600gb of VRAM + MEMORY (+ DISK) to fit the model (full) or 240 for the 1b quantized model. Of course this will be slow.

Through moonshot api it is pretty fast (much much much faster than Gemini 3 pro and Claude sonnet, probably faster than Gemini flash), though. To get similar experience they say at least 4xH200.

If you don't mind running it super slow, you still need around 600gb of VRAM + fast RAM.

It's already possible to run 4xH200 in a domestic environment (it would be instantaneous for most tasks, unbelievable speed). It's just very very expensive and probably challenging for most users, manageable/easy for the average hacker news crowd.

Expensive AND hard to source high end GPUs, if you manage to source for the old prices around 200 thousand dollars to get maximum speed I guess, you could probably run decently on a bunch of high end machines, for let's say, 40k (slow).

That would be quite the space heater, too!

I like Kimi-cli but it does leak memory.

I was using it for multi-hour tasks scripted via an self-written orchestrator on a small VM and ended up switching away from it because it would run slower and slower over time.

I'm running the Q4_K_M quant on a xeon with 7x A4000s and I'm getting about 8 tok/s with small context (16k). I need to do more tuning, I think I can get more out of it, but it's never gonna be fast on this suboptimal machine.

If you don't use Antrophic models there's no reason to use Claude Code at all. Opencode gives so much more choice.

That tends to work quite poorly because Claude Code does not use standard completions APIs. I tried it with Kimi, using litellm[proxy], and it failed in too many places.